Intel Core i7 4770K "Haswell" Benchmarks On Ubuntu Linux

This past weekend I shared the first experiences of running Intel's
new Haswell CPU on Linux. While Intel
Haswell is a beast and brings many new features and innovations to the new
Core CPUs succeeding Ivy Bridge, there were a few shortcomings with the initial
Linux support. It still appears that the Core i7 4770K is still being finicky
at times for both the processor and graphics, but in this article are the first
benchmarks. Up today are benchmarks of the Intel Core i7 4770K when running Ubuntu
13.04 with the Linux 3.10 kernel.

I went over the initial Intel Haswell Linux details on Saturday. The initial
support is there and overall it's in fairly good standing and roughly comparable
to where things were at in 2012 when Ivy Bridge launched. However, as far as where
the support is at in currently released Linux distributions, there's a lot better
support to find out of the very latest upstream code. With the widely used Ubuntu
13.04, Haswell processors will work, but better support, features, and performance
can be found with code not currently available through the standard repositories.
This state is comparable to that of other Linux distributions released so far
this year. Polished Haswell support coming to an "out of the box" Linux
desktop won't really be there until later in H2'2013.

In terms of what versions are best for Haswell, some key packages include the
Linux 3.10 kernel, Mesa 9.2 (what may be released as Mesa 10.0), GCC 4.8.1, and
LLVM 3.3. The latest kernel will yield not only faster performance if relying
upon Haswell graphics, but it offers all of the latest bug-fixes, the best power-savings
currently available to this latest Intel hardware, and has been running well from
my tests in the past few weeks. The Linux 3.11 kernel will also offer additional
improvements.

Anyhow, for seeing how the Intel Core i7 4770K "Haswell" processor
currently performs under Linux, in this article is a selection of CPU benchmarks
against older Intel Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge CPUs along with AMD CPU/APUs.
The Intel hardware being benchmarked were the Core i3 2120, i5 2400S, i5 2500K,
i5 3470, and i7 3770K. The AMD CPUs tested were an AMD A10-5800K APU and an AMD
VX-8350 Vishera CPU.

The motherboard used for the Intel Haswell testing was the DH87RL micro-ATX
motherboard. Intel hadn't sent out their enthusiast motherboard for Haswell that
they sent to other review sites, so I ended up having to buy their Haswell Round
Lake H87 motherboard, which isn't too overclocking friendly. As a result, no Haswell
overclocking results under Linux are being shared in this article. For all the
Sandy/Ivy Bridge CPU testing, the same Z77H2-A2X motherboard was used. All other
system components (16GB DDR3, 240GB OCZ Vertex 3 SSD, SilverStone PSU, etc) was
used for testing all of the Intel/AMD processors. The only other exception was
having to install a discrete graphics card for the AMD FX-8350 testing, but no
graphics tests are being shared in this article but will be published later today
or tomorrow to look at the Haswell Linux OpenGL performance.

The software stack remained the same during testing and was Ubuntu 13.04 x86_64
with the Linux 3.10 Git kernel, Unity 7.0.0, Mesa 9.2 Git, GCC 4.8.1, and LLVM
3.2. All processor benchmarking was handled in a fully automated and reproducible
manner using the open-source Phoronix
Test Suite software. Later on in this article are also performance-per-Watt
results calculated via real-time monitoring with the Phoronix Test Suite.

The processor benchmarks being shown in this article are to provide a glimpse
at the current look of Haswell on Linux. In terms of the likely performance issues
found, those matters are actively being investigated so stay tuned for any future
findings and more thorough Haswell Linux coverage once uncovering the problem(s).